Arts & Culture | Film

Once upon a time there was a village in which everyone was Jewish. They were all happy and lived full and rich Jewish lives for over 130 years. Then the Nazis came and erased everything — the town, the farms, the people and their lives. Until a prince came back to look for what was lost.

A few years ago, it was noted in this space that the heroic age of modernism in film, with its accompanying epic running times, had ended with the 1980s. However, it would appear that two of the world’s greatest documentary filmmakers, Claude Lanzmann and Frederick Wiseman, didn’t get the memo. Their new films, part of this year’s New York Film Festival, which kicks off on Sept. 27, are 218 and 244 minutes long, respectively. While neither Lanzmann’s “The Last of the Unjust” nor Wiseman’s “At Berkeley” are among the directors’ best work, each film has considerable merit, raises deeply troubling issues and rewards the patient and attentive viewer. (See Jewish Week website, thejewishweek.com, for review of Wiseman’s “At Berkeley.”)

For someone as detail-obsessed, as meticulous as Alan Berliner, this has been a frustrating few weeks. He ushers a guest into his Tribeca loft, apologizing for what seems to him a state of chaos. One side of the immense space is devoted to a nearly floor-to-ceiling collection of boxes, crates, film canisters and what-have-you. The boiler in his building is being replaced and everything he had in storage in the basement is apparently now piled on his floor. As befits a self-confessed perfectionist, Berliner’s stacks of belongings are neater than most people’s ordinary living space. (My office should only look this “messy.”)

It would not surprise me if the daily reviews for “Zaytoun,” Eran Riklis’ new film which opens on Sept. 20, chide the Israeli filmmaker for sentimentalizing the film’s central relationship. The movie traces the slowly growing friendship between Yoni (Stephen Dorff), a downed Israeli flyer, and his erstwhile captor Fahed (Abdallah El Akal), a 12-year-old Palestinian refugee who helps him escape captivity during the first Lebanon War. As the pair move from open enmity to tough love and eventually to mutual respect, it would be easy to overlook the intelligent emotional distance with which Riklis treats them, to mistake the film for an easy celebration of the Rodney King-can’t-we-all-get-along school of ineffectual good will.

Howard Lutnick did not lose his life on Sept. 11, 2001 because he took his son to school. The Cantor Fitzgerald CEO raced to the scene of the terrorist attack and, during the collapse, he struggled to breathe, thinking he might die.

It wasn’t planned that way, but “Afternoon Delight,” the first feature film directed and written by author and television veteran Jill Soloway, is opening at a perfect time in the Jewish year. A mordantly funny and deeply felt film about transgression and forgiveness, it is just the thing for the end of Elul and the coming of the Days of Awe.